Parlour’s Best of 2012!: Enjoy Brooklyn Like a Local

Since we’re on a mental and physical vacation until January 7 — I’m in California, Shannon’s in Washington, D.C., then New Orleans, and Sherry’s North Carolina — we’re serving up Parlour’s Best of 2012! Each day this week, you’ll get a chance to reminisce on what made us all laugh, cry and suck our teeth during the last 12 months. I dug up a few of our faves … and I’m sweating, WOO!

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Hello [Enter non-African American/West Indian/Black descriptive here] Person!First, welcome to Brooklyn. You did it! Or specifically, welcome to the more African Diaspora side of Brooklyn.  Namely Bedford-Stuyvesant, however this can apply to Oakland, Brixton, and other “been cool and now it has been ‘discovered’” newly gentrified areas around the globe.While you’ve been paying higher rents for smaller spaces in Manhattan, Park Slope or Williamsburg – we’ve been busy making Bed-Stuy pretty awesome for the last 50 or so years. In the last 10 years a younger, black “creative class” from Chicago, DC, Atlanta, etc, also started to call the area home as a reaction to the rising rent prices of Clinton Hill, Williamsburg, Ft. Greene and Prospect Heights. Basically it was cheap, the apartments were huge, we could get to work on time and it was like a little slice of our respective hometowns. We got clowned for living in Bed-Stuy as well…”don’t get robbed the way home” was something familiar to all of us when leaving a Manhattan event. But little did you know, we’ve just been making it cool. Black Cool is real, and when it thrives in a central location, more will flock to it. See Ft. Greene. So with that—welcome to the Stuy ya’ll.Read the rest of Parlour’s Best of 2012 post here!